A major show is this month opening at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre (MAC). Celebrating the cutting edge of fashion design, The Offbeat Sari features exhibits and artworks by Indian designers, wearers and craftspeople. What’s On spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Priya Khanchandani, to find out more about the sari as a cultural icon, a field for innovation, and an expression of identity...

Opening at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) at the end of June, The Offbeat Sari is a major exhibition celebrating the contemporary sari. The show will bring together a selection of striking garments designed, worn and crafted by people from India.

The exhibition, which was developed for display at London’s Design Museum by curator Priya Khanchandani, will be bringing colour, innovation and design to MAC before embarking on a global tour.

“The sari is a garment worn mainly by women across South Asia.” Priya explains. “It typically consists of a single piece of unstitched cloth, around six to nine yards in length, and it’s draped around the body - and that’s how it takes its form. It takes a lot of different forms nowadays. It can be anything from a kind of pleated skirt accompanied by a blouse, to a sari that’s pre-draped, that has already been stitched into place.”

Priya, who has childhood memories of such garments being worn by her grandmother, and who came to wear them herself in adulthood, does not see the sari simply as a piece of clothing: “It reflects a very rich tapestry of South Asian culture. It represents womanhood, it represents identity across regions, across classes, communities and history. The sari can reflect cultural heritage, personal expression and occasions - different types of saris are worn in different ways, depending on the occasion.”

The ‘Offbeat’ element of the exhibition’s title hints that the pieces on display sit outside generally held beliefs about how saris might be worn and designed.

“The idea for the exhibition came from a desire to challenge the way that South Asian culture is conventionally depicted - as being timeless, or rigid in the colonial or post-colonial past. I wanted to showcase South Asia as a culture in the process of evolution, and as relevant to contemporary fashion as anywhere else.”

Priya lived in India around 2015, where she found fashion designers experimenting and reimagining the sari in exciting new ways.

“I started researching the subject over the years, and following women on Instagram who wore the sari with a new purpose which, to me, reflected the power of contemporary womanhood. They were owning their identity - kind of re-appropriating the traditional significance of the sari, which had maybe become something that was more restrained. They were liberating it from that definition.”

Priya and the exhibition’s design team had many decisions to make in the process of compiling the showcase - not least, deciding how the garments would be prepared and presented.

“Would they need to be steamed, folded, draped - and if draped, then in what style? We worked with a specialist sari draper on delivering the drapes that we had decided on. That involved weeks of preparation. Then we brought on board a design team - an architect and a graphic designer - who worked with us on the design of the architecture, and the interpretation of the captions. For me, that was about coming up with a visual identity that reflected contemporary India, that wasn’t harking back to the usual tropes that we see - something fresh, that used colour.”

The pieces on display certainly celebrate the breadth of innovation in fashion design. A piece by designers Abraham & Thakore is adorned with sequins which, on a closer look, are punched out of disused X-ray film. Another sari, created by AKAARO, is dyed with ink distilled from the air of Delhi.

“There are clear messages embedded in these - they’re political in a sense. They show that fashion isn’t just about style; it’s about embodiment and the story that we wish to tell about ourselves - through how we wear something, but also how it’s made, how it’s designed, and how it’s presented. For example, there’s a small studio called HUEMN, who designed a quilted sari that was made in parallel with their street-style puffer jackets. It has this casual, urban feel.”

Not all of the pieces on display are wearable items, with some falling decisively into the category of expressive works of art.

“There’s a sari, Manju by Bharti Kher, which is wrapped around a plinth, rather than being displayed on a mannequin, and it’s solidified in lacquer. It’s a portrait of an absent body, and each plinth - there’s a series of them, and we’ve got one - is the approximate weight of the artist and represents a woman that she knows. It’s an abstract way of reflecting the identity of somebody, which in a way is what a sari does; it’s a single piece of cloth that doesn’t have an identity and doesn’t have a form until it’s embodied by somebody. I think that message comes across in that particular work in a really interesting way.”

MAC will be The Offbeat Sari’s third location, after its debut in London and a stop-off in Amsterdam. It will then embark on a global tour. With no plans as yet for any more showings in the UK, MAC is the place to see it.

“I’m really excited that the exhibition is travelling to Birmingham, which is a city that’s so well known for its South Asian community. It’s got populations from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - they’re all places where the sari is worn. MAC is a fantastic place for the exhibition. Its artistic programme reflects and represents the cultures of Birmingham, and I think the programming of this exhibition will resonate with Brummies of South Asian heritage in a meaningful way. It’s an important way for MAC to serve their audiences, their neighbours in the city.”

MAC has planned a series of events inspired by The Offbeat Sari, and Priya will be revisiting the gallery in September to present a talk about the exhibition. The venue has also collaborated with local South Asian arts organisation Sampad to produce an accompanying display called Sari Stories.

“They’ve invited people from Birmingham and the West Midlands to share a photo and a story behind a sari that’s of personal significance to them. That will bring a local context to the exhibition, which I’m really excited about. I grew up in Luton, a town with a big South Asian population. This exhibition is for everyone, but I think the significance in Birmingham is different.”

The Offbeat Sari shows at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham, from Saturday 28 June to Sunday 2 November. Sari Stories is on display at the venue until Sunday 19 October.

By Jessica Clixby